Glitsky sucked at his teeth. ‘What time was this, when this person came back?’
Hardy glanced at José, making a little face. ‘It must have been pretty early.’
‘Then it doesn’t really let off your man Fowler, does it?’
‘Well, I was thinking it couldn’t very well have been a man at all. José here recognized the coat -’
The guard piped in, ‘It was a woman, sir. There’s no doubt of that.’
‘It was a woman wearing the coat, okay. It could have been a man who let himself onto the boat. It could have been two separate incidents.’
‘Andy didn’t have a key.’
‘You can’t prove a negative.’
Hardy was getting frustrated that Glitsky didn’t see this. ‘Abe, the coat was aboard here.’
‘How do we know that, Diz?’
‘May said it was here,’ he said. ‘Our perp took it, which was why it wasn’t in your inventory.’
Glitsky patiently answered. ‘I’m not saying it didn’t happen your way, Diz. I’m saying it also very well could have happened at least one other way. May could have worn the coat down here, seen Andy – hell, if he was framing her he could’ve invited her down for just that reason, so she’d be seen in her unique coat. After she realized what was happening she dumped the coat, then saw her chance to get it back by hassling us.’
‘That just didn’t happen, Abe.’
‘So prove it.’
‘It was a woman, Abe -’
Glitsky was not convinced. ‘I’d make pretty sure what your client was doing that morning before I brought it up to the jury. Besides, the only woman alive related to this case is Celine Nash. Aside from having no motive, she was in Santa Cruz. I checked.’
Hardy stood his ground. ‘I still think it was a woman.’
Glitsky shrugged. ‘Well, neither of us think May did it, so who…?’
Hardy’s mind was wrestling with the incomprehensible -Jane, his ex-wife, Andy Fowler’s daughter. She hadn’t told him the whole truth about her relationship with Owen Nash. It was understandable, why should she have, a one-time thing, he’d told himself. But what if…? All right, what if. Get tough, face the possible, however impossible. Jane had continued seeing Nash, he had dumped her for May Shinn… he had totally worked her, and she had killed him and either confided in her father or, somehow, he had found out on his own. No wonder he was acting genial, passive. Cover for his daughter… Would he have done everything he’d done with that motivation? Sure, he would have hated Nash. And this torch he was supposedly carrying for Shinn -didn’t it make more sense that he’d be angry at her for dropping him? There would be a sweetness in making her pay for his daughter’s crime. As pay she certainly had.
He parked in front of Jane’s house – once it had belonged to both of them – on Jackson in Pacific Heights. He had heard on the radio coming over that more than two inches of rain had already fallen since midnight. Going up the steps, he knocked at the custom door with its molded glass inlay. He saw a man’s form appear through the door. ‘Perfect,’ he thought, thinking he was about to meet Chuck Chuck Bo-Buck or whoever else was the man of the month.
The door opened and he was looking at his client.
‘Andy, we’ve got to talk,’ he said.
‘You are such a bastard.’ Jane was crying, her legs curled up under her on her bed.
‘Jane, I’m trying to save your father’s life here. It’s not been the best time I’ve ever had either.’
Hardy felt terrible seeing his ex-wife in tears. He could be glib – or pretend to be – about the men in her life after him, but he wasn’t blind to the fact that she was looking for the right one, that what she wanted was a man steady and strong who would love her and stay true and she wasn’t finding him. He supposed, perhaps wrongly, that he’d at least come the closest to that ideal, but something – their own history? – had made the commitment impossible.
He could see her every day and not think about it, but now, confronted by it, it was very hard.
‘How can you even think that, Dismas? What kind of person do you really think I am? I told you it was nothing. It was just a night.’
Andy was waiting in the living room. Hardy would get to him if he had to, but first he had to know about Jane and Owen Nash. ‘Just one night? And you never saw him again?’
‘That’s right. It happens. What do you want me to say?’
‘I don’t want you to say anything if that’s the truth.’
She hit the bed with a balled-up fist. ‘I told you it’s the truth. I saw Owen Nash one day, one night. One.’
‘Okay, okay, Jane.’
‘What are you saying? I killed him?’ Reading his expression, she brought her hand to her mouth. ‘Oh, my God, you really think that.’ She jumped up, sniffling, and went to her bureau, opening a wide black book and turning the pages. She turned to him, holding the book open for him to see. ‘June eighteenth to twenty-second. The I. Magnin Summer Fashions Exposition. All day every day I’m giving seminars and hosting teas. Check on it.’
Hardy looked down, hating this. ‘I believe you, Jane, I said I believed you.’
She pulled the bureau chair out and sat back down, crying again, silently, wiping at her eyes with a Kleenex. Hardy got up off the bed and left the room.
60
He told Andy they had to get together the next day to go over his testimony. They made an appointment for noon, and then Hardy left him to comfort his daughter.
He had written Frannie a note saying he would probably be gone all day and she had left one for him – she was at her late ex-husband’s mother’s, Rebecca’s grandmother’s, house, and would be back by six. She hoped to see him then.
He went to his office and threw darts for twenty minutes, now and then glancing at the window to watch the rain drop out of the gray.
This was the time he was supposed to be gearing up for his defense, for the legal battle between him and Pullios on the interpretation of the evidence that Andy Fowler had allegedly killed Owen Nash. But Hardy felt that somehow the essence was being lost. It reminded him of his high-school debates where he would argue both sides of something, sometimes three or four times, in the same afternoon. As though there was no correct answer.
Oh, and he knew it was the fashion, had been since he had gone to college – don’t make value judgments. Relativity was king. There was no absolute truth. But, like it or not, he had grown up to believe that there was truth, that right differed fundamentally from wrong.
And what he was supposed to do on Monday was continue the debate. He knew that. He would call Abe Glitsky and Art Drysdale, and possibly José, as witnesses, and wind up with Andy testifying on his own behalf. He had been preparing his summation almost since the trial had begun.
The problem was that now, so far as he could sort it out, little of what really had happened had found its way into this trial, the supposed crucible of truth.
On the one hand he didn’t want to divert his attention away from his defense of Andy – he knew he should be sitting at his desk, outlining, writing key phrases and arguments to win over the jury. But the other side of him felt that now that he was satisfied that he knew what had happened he should pursue that truth singlemindedly. Only that pursuit could take Andy Fowler’s fate out of the hands of the jury, remove it from debate.
The only thing that would ultimately clear his client was an alternate explanation of events. But the time he spent on that took away from his formal defense at trial.
He threw darts.
The inventories were no help. They listed sweatbands taken from the drawers in the desks next to the bed, some weight-lifting gloves, leg warmers. Switching back to his formal trial preparation, Hardy pulled his legal pad in front of him. Should he call José as a witness and introduce everything he had found this morning? He wrote it down, looked at it and realized that nothing he had found out proved that Andy had not been on the boat Thursday morning. Prove a negative…